For the last few years, I’ve been working quite often with quartertones, and the most effective way I find of just practically hearing these notes is by having a second keyboard, so that one keyboard is tuned a quartertone below the other one. With a single keyboard you could obviously imagine what the quartertone would sound like, but I prefer to actually hear the physical sounds.

I got my second keyboard about a year ago. Up until that point I’d actually used a guitar and a banjo, tuning those down a quartertone – it was ok, but it wasn’t very effective.

You can of course use computers as well, but I don’t like doing this sort of creative composing on the computer. I feel that especially with most notation software it’s limiting, you end up writing more what works on the computer than actually what works on the instruments or on the voices.

So I thought it was important to get this second keyboard if I wanted to explore different tunings and different quartertones – I suppose if I worked on eighth tones or third tones I’d just have to keep getting more and more of them. But I think that at the moment quartertones are enough.

Through His Teeth is scored for eight instruments. It’s quite a small ensemble, but I tried to get as big a range of colours and sounds as I could out of that. So there are quite a few instruments that are capable of playing chords. There is a harp, there is an accordion, there’s various tuned percussions, and there’s violin, cello and bass. And against that there is also a clarinet and a trumpet. It’s a kind of small, mixed ensemble.

I tried also to balance it as much as I could, so I count the accordion as a sort of wind instrument. So there’s a clarinet, trumpet and accordion doing some wind-side of things, there are three strings, and then the harp and the percussion as tuned instruments.

Because of the quartertones, it had to be instruments that can play them better than others. Obviously for the harp, percussion and accordion, it’s not easy to get quartertones on, but for the other instruments, especially the strings and trumpet, it’s something that shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

I decided that the singers were not going to be singing in quartertones – these are only heard from the ensemble. It’s partly a practical thing: some singers can obviously sing quartertones, but others find it very hard. And for a while I wondered whether if the note was strong enough in the ensemble, whether it would be ok to use it in the voice. But in the end I decided against it: partly just to keep things clear in my own head, but also for the singers – they’ve probably got enough to do anyways without worrying about the quartertones.

So it’s something that is happening from the music surrounding the characters really, it’s something in the air. They never go into that directly.

Composer Luke Bedford talks about working with Scottish playwright David Harrower and how they created the characters for their upcoming chamber opera Through His Teeth. The interview was recorded in Berlin in October 2013.

I’ve been speaking to David Harrower, who has written the libretto for the
new opera, about what kind of subject or theme we wanted to play with. David
very often works with true stories as a starting point, either things from
newspaper reports or something you have heard.

We’d been speaking to the Royal Opera House about doing this piece, and they
asked whether we’d be interested in doing something on the subject of Faust
– which initially we weren’t over the moon about. A sort of traditional
telling of the Faust stories has been done so many times that we were
quite unsure about what we could add to that. So we knew that we had to find
our own take on that, a different way of doing it.

This
is the interview with Luke Bedford that was mentioned in the introduction of
this blog. It was conducted in June 2013, when Through His Teeth was still without a title. Harrower and Bedford already
had very clear ideas about the storyline and the instrumentation, however.

Intrigued by the composer’s words, we decided that we’d continue to document the work’s process of creation. Starting today we will provide you with regular updates regarding the development of Through His Teeth, ranging from the composing of the score and the writing of David Harrower’s libretto to the actual printing of the score and its production – who knows, we might even catch the postman when he finally delivers the score to Sian Edwards and the Royal Opera House.

What will the rehearsals at the ROH look like? Do you want to catch a sneak peek of the score before the première? Now’s your chance.

This post and all future posts in this series will be available on our page dedicated to Through His Teeth, which you can find here.

This piece is a reworking of my Wonderful Two-Headed Nightingalefor
violin, viola and fifteen players. The original title was taken from a 19th
century poster advertising a pair of singing conjoined twins: Millie and
Christine McCoy. They were born in slavery in 1851, sold to a showman, and yet
managed to escape the fate of many performers at freak shows and built a
relatively normal life for themselves. Something of their story and the poster
intrigued me, and I found parallels with the music I was trying to write. From
early on in the composition process I knew that the two soloists would be
forced to play either identical or very similar music for most of the piece. I
felt the tension between their combined, unified sound and their desire to
break free from one another could be richly exploited. But I also knew that
they would never be successful in tearing free. They would remain as locked
together at the end of the piece as they were at the start.

Here are some excerpts
from Colin Clarke’s rave review for Tempo journal of Luke Bedford’sCD Wonderful Two-Headed Nightingale, released on col legno last year:

Wonderful Two-Headed Nightingale: The hyper-gestural opening, the
minimalist-influenced shards of accompaniment that underpin yearning,
quasi-Romantic solo lines all speak of a major imagination at work. […] This
live performance is simply remarkable in its intensity.

By the Screen in the Sun at the Hill on the Gold:Bedford takes the simple
device of arpeggio and saturates his texture with it. […] the work’s surface is
glistening and huge, moving to manic passages in which the pitch rises to the
extreme top end in a series of explosions. This top-class recording (Alte Oper,
Frankfurt) was made the day after the world première.

“Bedford’s score is impeccably crafted and it is sensitively played by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group.” (Daily Telegraph)

"A score of substance and ultimate quality combined with beautiful
words with extraordinary creative and artistic direction from the
creative team and magnificent staging from John Fulljames." (Paul Guest/Ceasefire magazine)

“In his latest work, Renewal,
British composer Luke Bedford
has achieved the rare feat of having written a piece that has everything:
dynamism and drive, a singular yet powerfully centred harmonic language, a
strong sense of thematic development, an altogether wondrous control of flow
and counter-flow, and, above all, moments of transcendent beauty.” (Guy Dammann, The
Guardian)

“The music moved with impulsive energy, dismantling material
as quickly as it had been gathered together. […] Perhaps the most captivating
moment was when Bedford stripped his musical materials down to pure noise. […] The programme as a whole was very well received and it was
encouraging to see one of London’s major concert venues lend this level of
support and attentiveness to an emerging artist.” (Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade, bachtrack)

The London Sinfonietta will perform Renewal on 16 August in Dubrovnik, Croatia. We will keep you
posted.

Thinking back to the first
time I heard The Riteas a
13-year-old, I remember being instantly enchanted and terrified by the
piece. I had heard nothing like it before and it quite simply opened up the
world of twentieth century music to me. And even now, a hundred years on from
the première, its force and violent beauty are a thing of wonder.(Luke Bedford)

1913
certainly was an exciting year for Universal Edition. Two and a half months
after Schönberg’s “scandal concert” in Vienna – where the issue was not
merely a question of how an audience treated the performers, it was about
partisanship at a crossroads of musical history – the world première of Stravinsky’s and Nijinsky’s Le
Sacre du printemps took place in Paris on 29 May 1913 and sent shock waves through the European art world. A quick search on the internet is enough to
get an overview of some of the devastating reviews that the première received, yet
opinions differed: UE composer Gian Francesco Malipiero, who attended the
performance, would later remember the experience as an awakening “from a long
and dangerous lethargy”.

But it’s
not only a temporal proximity that connects these two events: Stravinsky was
said to have kept a score of Schönberg’s 3
Piano Pieces, Op 11 – where the last piece is free from any tonal or
motivic references – with him at the time he was composing The Rite. Stravinsky in return seems to have been of major
importance to Béla Bartók, who wrote his pantomime ballet The Miraculous Mandarin partly as a response to his interest in
Stravinsky, admiring the composer’s way of making “these chasing motivic
complexes fit into each other by balancing the weight ratios with extreme
precision.”

The
BBC released an article questioning whether The Rite did actually spark a riot,
and the conclusion is drawn that even today, “we cannot be quite sure”. Did The
Rite lose its edge in the twenty-first century? What is your opinion?